I'll have to say the original Pitfall. The others may have more bells and whistles, but it's the original that showed us the 2600 wasn't just for playing Pong anymore, and it's still one of the first games anyone thinks of when you mention Atari.

I've only played the 2600 ones but I picked the original mainly because of nostalgia. That was and still is one of my favorite games of all time. Pitfall 2 is also an excellent game and would win my second place vote...I guess it would get second by default anyways though - LOL

Pitfall 2 on the 5200, i liked the 2600 one but the 5200 one had that awasome 2nd maze to it... I gotta give activision credit for adding something to it and not just another port, with better graphics like other games.

Why does everyone hate Super Pitfall?
Granted, Pitfall 2 was my vote (awesome), but Super Pitfall was HARD.
I've met few people who knew how to beat it.
It took a lot of time to be able to finish it. Did anyone here mange to?

If the later versions also had zero replay value then I guess I would be forced to choose the lesser evil and vote for the original since beginners could walk left and skip a screen they died on instead of replaying it until they went insane. It would have to be hacked or reprogrammed with a large dose of Controlled Randomness for it to be a favorite game.

If the later versions also had zero replay value then I guess I would be forced to choose the lesser evil and vote for the original since beginners could walk left and skip a screen they died on instead of replaying it until they went insane. It would have to be hacked or reprogrammed with a large dose of Controlled Randomness for it to be a favorite game.

That would be cool ... a new game each time you play, like NetHack (or Rogue, Diablo, etc etc). It wouldn't make it any harder, but it would make things a bit more interesting if you had memorized the original.

. . . I think games like Adventure and E.T. are much better than that so-called adventure game Pitfall II: Lost Caverns where things are always in the same place and you jump over mindless enemies that just bounce up and down or move back and forth and usually don't even know you're there. Pitfall II: Lost Caverns did have some cool things in it such as being able to swim, but for the most part, it was just another lame exercise in perfect timing with nothing else to offer except the frustration of going back many screens to do it all over again. At least the original Pitfall let you skip or retry the screen you were on (your choice depending on whether you went left or right). The idiotically frustrating idea of making you go back multiple screens was not an advance, it was a giant step backwards and that model is still used today by misguided game designers.

I'm not the only one who believes that the most popular Activision games which lacked replayability and smart enemies were a major influence on those dark years dominated by Nintendo. It's too bad that more game designers back then weren't inspired by Adventure to make all kinds of replayable games with smarter enemies that weren't dependent on static starting positions and predetermined movements. If various types of games that were based on the Adventure template could have been created, maybe gamers would have demanded more instead of being lulled into accepting that vast wasteland of games for so long. We'd come across an occasional oasis over the years, but even now we are still just barely crawling out, reaching for the edges of the promised land.